“That’s easy,” he said. “It’s easy for me, dear father, so it can’t be difficult, for I’m an awful brute. We shall have to make a pact, you and I. We must burn what we know out of our hearts, just as you have burned the evidence of it. It doesn’t exist any more. It was some wretched dream.”
“Oh, Colin!” said his father, and in those words was all the wonder of love which cannot credit the beauty, the splendour, that it contemplates.
Colin saw his father to his room, and then walked back down the great corridor, quenching the lights as he went, for he had told the butler that no one need sit up. He drew back the curtains of the window at the head of the stairs as he passed and looked out on to the clearness of the frosty midnight. Moonlight lay over the whiteness of the gardens and terraces, but the yew hedge, black and unfrosted, seemed like some funeral route to be followed to where the ice gleamed with a strange vividness as if it were the skylight to some illuminated place below. Then, letting the curtain fall again, he went softly past the head of the lit passage where his room and Violet’s lay, to put out the light at the far end of this corridor. In the last room to the left he knew Raymond was lying, and he went in.
The last toilet had been finished and the body lay on its bed below a sheet. Candles were burning, as if that which lay there dreaded the darkness, and on the table by the bed was a great bowl of white hothouse flowers. Colin had not seen Raymond since that white face looked at him across the rim of broken ice; there had been disfigurement, he imagined, and, full of curiosity, he turned back the sheet. There were little scars on the nose and ears particularly, but nothing appalling, and he looked long at Raymond’s face. The heavy eyelids were closed, the mouth pouted sullenly; death had not changed him at all; he hardly looked asleep, drowsy at the most. Not a ray of pity softened Colin’s smiling face of triumph.
For a month after Raymond’s death, the four of them, representing three generations of Staniers, remained quietly there. His name was mentioned less and less among them, for, after Colin’s disclosure to his father, Philip avoided all speech about him, and, as far as he could, all thought. Horror came with the thought of him. The most his father could do was to try to forget him. But for an accident in that matter of a punctured tyre, Colin would now be lying where Raymond lay, and all sunshine would have passed from his declining years. He was no more than sixty-six, but he was old; Colin used to wonder at the swift advance of old age, like some evening shadow, which lengthened so rapidly. But beyond the shadow Philip’s sky was full of light. His desire had been realised, though by tragic ways, and his death, neither dreaded nor wished-for, would realise it.
There were, however, events in the future which he anticipated with eagerness; the first was Colin’s coming of age next March. For generations that festival had been one of high prestige in the family, and in spite of the recency of Raymond’s death, he meant to celebrate it with due splendour.
The other was even more intimately longed-for; early in July, Violet would, if all were well, become a mother; and to see Colin’s son, to know that the succession would continue, was the dearest hope of his life. And these two expectations brought back some St. Martin’s summer of the spirit to him; he began to look forward, as is the way of youth, instead of dwelling in the past. The lengthening shadow stayed, it even retreated.... But Colin had an important piece of business to effect before his father’s death, and he was waiting, without impatience but watchfully, for an opportunity to set out on it. As usual, he wanted the suggestion which would give him this opportunity to come, not from himself, but from others; he would seem then to do what he desired because it was urged on him.
A week of dark, foggy weather towards the end of February favoured his plans. Influenza was about, and he had a touch of it, in no way serious, indeed possibly useful. After a couple of days in his room he reappeared again, but with all the fire gone out of him. He was silent and depressed, and saw that his father’s eyes watched him with anxiety.
“Still feeling rather down?” asked Philip one morning, when Colin pushed an untasted plate away from him at breakfast.
Colin made a tragic face at the window. Nothing could be seen outside, the fog was opaque and impenetrable.